Egypt began on Wednesday to deliver a million litres of fuel to Gaza, a Palestinian official said, in an attempt to ease the Palestinian enclave’s desperate electricity crisis.
The fuel, trucked in through the Rafah border between Egypt and Gaza, will be routed to the territory’s only power station — closed for several months due to fuel shortages.
The deliveries come two days after Israel began reducing its electricity supplies to Gaza, following Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s decision to stop paying for them.
Wael Abu Omar, head of media at the Rafah crossing, told AFP that eight shipments had entered, with a further 14 expected later in the day.
“A million litres (220,000 gallons) of fuel for the power plant will enter today,” he said.
The Israeli move had been set to leave Gazans with as little as two hours of mains electricity a day, prompting a UN warning that basic services in the enclave faced “total collapse”.
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